NEXT is a seven-kilowatt thruster that receives electrical power from solar panels or a nuclear power source

NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) ion engine has broken the record for hours of continuous operation.

The NEXT ion thruster has clocked 43,000 hours of continuous operation at NASA's Glenn Research Center's Electric Propulsion Laboratory, breaking the overall record. The 43,000 hours is equivalent to nearly five years of continuous operation.

NEXT is a seven-kilowatt thruster that receives electrical power from solar panels or a nuclear power source instead of burning fuel. The electricity is then used to ionize molecules of xenon and a cathode to accelerate them electrostatically. When the molecules come out of the engine, they create thrust.

For the entire 43,000 hours of continuous operation, NEXT only consumed 770 kg of xenon propellant. The engine would offer 30 million-newton-seconds of total impulse to a spacecraft.

The NEXT ion engine is meant to send spacecraft into deep space missions further and faster with more efficiency than engines that burn fuel.

Making more efficient spacecraft has been an important goal in the space industry. For instance, SpaceX, a private California-based space transport company that was the first of its kind to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) this year, recently showed off its Grasshopper project for reusable rockets. The Grasshopper Project is a Falcon first stage with a landing gear that's capable of taking off and landing vertically. It does this by shooting into orbit, turning around, restarting the engine, heading back to the launch site, changing its direction and deploying the landing gear. The end result is a vertical landing.

A heat-signature is really just light, whose spectral distribution reflects the temperature of whatever heated surface is emitting it. Trying to communicate by modulating the temperature of the engine exhaust would, I would expect, offer no advantages over using normal electromagnetic-based technology that is specifically designed for communication (ie, radio).James H

It won't really "boost" the speed over your regular chemical rockets as the amount of thrust they produce is relatively small.

The advantage however is that where Chemical rockets will boost for minuets/hours an ION engine would be able to boost for days/months. - Perfect for a long voyage as it will gather up speed the entire trip.Combine it with Nuclear and it may even last a century provided you have enough Xenon.

So... no gravity well? Once you're past a certain point, that issue vanishes... but then again after a certain point the solar winds will also cease to aid you. More importantly, is your craft guaranteed to have perfectly even heat radiation? Is space is a perfect vacuum? The deceleration might be almost negligible, but it exists.

Anyway, the "turn around" part of his post indicated that he was talking about a mission to a specific destination, like Mars. If you just keep on accelerating... it makes for a rough landing. Now for deep space exploration, you wouldn't need to turn around and fire the engine the other way, of course.

So as the vehicle approaches its destination, there is no slowing down???? Would be amazing to use your theory to put something into orbit around a distant body......

2nd-- Yes, there is a normal expectation of deceleration in space, be it microscopic dust particles in your path or gravitational pulls, it does happen. Even a radiat source striking the surface of the craft can have an effect similar to a crook's radiometer and impede velocity.

Well, uh actually they do, as the ion drive is - as Tiffany's article states - a lot more efficient than a chemical rocket engine or cold gas thruster. Since a probe can't carry much fuel with it, this difference in efficiency would let the ion drive build up more velocity over time - perhaps a lot more, depending on the length of the trip.

I think part of the way it works is based on the "Relativity" idea that as you accelerate something up towards the speed of light you add to the mass of the object, so with ions, which have a mass of next to nothing (but, importantly, not nothing), as you accelerate them their mass goes up. Say you happened to increase the mass of the ions by 10%, that's 10% less fuel than you'd otherwise need to carry.

Hang on, this is still back in Newtonian physics - Newton's 3rd law of motion. The spacecraft ejects the propellant at force. The propellant exerts an equal but opposite force on the spacecraft, i.e. the spacecraft moves in the opposite direction to the propellant's velocity.

The only difference from a chemical rocket is efficiency. Chemical rockets waste stacks of energy generating heat, and you can only store limited amounts of energy chemically. Ion propulsion is far more efficient but it produces very little thrust. It's the idea of having them on for months or even years (instead of minutes for normal rockets) to build up velocity with relatively little propellent needed (less weight!) that is attractive.

The simplest way to think about the efficency of ion thrusters versus chemical rockets is that a chemical rocket gets its thrust from a chemical reaction of the propellants thus the propellant is both energy source and the mass used to accelerate the ship. With ion drive the energy source can be any source of electricity which can come from far more compact sources like nuclear fission or from outside via solar/beamed power. Also ion drive acellerates the "probellant" far more than any chemical rocket so the space ship gets more acceleration from a given mass of propellent. So the spaceship can be lighter or at least devote less mass to thrust/manuvering or be able to accelerate more or longer.

The downside is that the various ion drive ideas don't push very hard without mindbogglingly huge amounts of electricity. Which makes them impractical at this time to launch anything.

Speed is only relative.. It's the push of one object from another that matters. In space I could be going 10,000 mph (relative to object A). but If I push off an equally sized body at 10mph, we will move away from each other at that 10mph. So I will be going 10,005 and it would be going 9,995. But that's only relative to object A. If Object B is moving the same speed as me, after I push off each will be moving 5mph, but in opposite directions. How fast is any object going, well that just depends on what object you're basing the speeds off of.

That's why we can only see so far in space, about 13 billion light years. Because after that space is moving away from us at faster than light speeds. But you cannot really say how fast we are moving or how fast that part of space is moving.

Its the force of the separation. Not the same thing as thrusting air out the back of a jet, because in that case speed is not just "relative". There is, in affect a 0 mph when talking about jets on earth. Not with rockets in space, until we start hitting near the speed of light its all relative.